Submitted by Dr. Daria on
Image by Ryan McGuire from http://Pixabay .com
"I love a good hoax and this one was a beauty. In 1996, Alan Sokal, a New York University physicist and self-described “academic leftist,” composed an essay that was basically a bunch of bologna. He sent it to the left-leaning “cultural studies” journal Social Text. Perhaps the best description of the essay's acceptance at the time comes from George F. Will of the Washington Post who wrote that those involved " ... swooned, perhaps in part because Sokal larded his nonsense with political tropes that are catnip to lettered leftists — “emancipatory mathematics,” “demystify and democratize the production of scientific knowledge,” “the crisis of late-capitalist production relations. This would have been obvious to anyone whose intelligence had not been anesthetized by the patois of “deconstructionist” and “poststructuralist” professors.” * - Dr. Daria
It’s now been over twenty years since the “Sokal affair,” also known as the “Sokal hoax”, in which physicist/mathematician Alan Sokal submitted a bogus postmodernist paper to the journal Social Text, with the jawbreaking pomo title, “Transgressing the boundaries: Towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity.” (Paper free at link https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html )
The paper used real quotes from professors of science studies, as well as other postmodernist scholars, to show that the field of quantum gravity was riddled with patriarchy and deeply polluted by social attitudes. In reality, it was intended to show that the humanities (not all of them!) were infected by a profound subjectivism about ways of finding truth, as well as by a deep suspicion of science.
Alan Sokal in 2011
Here are a couple of quotes from Alan’s paper; only a postmodernist could take these seriously:
Over the past two decades there has been extensive discussion among critical theorists with regard to the characteristics of modernist versus postmodernist culture; and in recent years these dialogues have begun to devote detailed attention to the specific problems posed by the natural sciences. In particular, Madsen and Madsen have recently given a very clear summary of the characteristics of modernist versus postmodernist science. They posit two criteria for a postmodern science [JAC: italicized bits are quotes from other papers; consult original for references]:
A simple criterion for science to qualify as postmodern is that it be free from any dependence on the concept of objective truth. By this criterion, for example, the complementarity interpretation of quantum physics due to Niels Bohr and the Copenhagen school is seen as postmodernist.
Clearly, quantum gravity is in this respect an archetypal postmodernist science. Secondly,
The other concept which can be taken as being fundamental to postmodern science is that of essentiality. Postmodern scientific theories are constructed from those theoretical elements which are essential for the consistency and utility of the theory.
Thus, quantities or objects which are in principle unobservable — such as space-time points, exact particle positions, or quarks and gluons — ought not to be introduced into the theory. While much of modern physics is excluded by this criterion, quantum gravity again qualifies: in the passage from classical general relativity to the quantized theory, space-time points (and indeed the space-time manifold itself) have disappeared from the theory.
However, these criteria, admirable as they are, are insufficient for a liberatory postmodern science: they liberate human beings from the tyranny of “absolute truth” and “objective reality”, but not necessarily from the tyranny of other human beings. In Andrew Ross’ words, we need a science “that will be publicly answerable and of some service to progressive interests.” From a feminist standpoint, Kelly Oliver makes a similar argument:
… in order to be revolutionary, feminist theory cannot claim to describe what exists, or, “natural facts.” Rather, feminist theories should be political tools, strategies for overcoming oppression in specific concrete situations. The goal, then, of feminist theory, should be to develop strategic theories — not true theories, not false theories, but strategic theories.
But wait! There’s more!:
Finally, the content of any science is profoundly constrained by the language within which its discourses are formulated; and mainstream Western physical science has, since Galileo, been formulated in the language of mathematics. But whose mathematics? The question is a fundamental one, for, as Aronowitz has observed, “neither logic nor mathematics escapes the `contamination’ of the social.” And as feminist thinkers have repeatedly pointed out, in the present culture this contamination is overwhelmingly capitalist, patriarchal and militaristic: “mathematics is portrayed as a woman whose nature desires to be the conquered Other.” Thus, a liberatory science cannot be complete without a profound revision of the canon of mathematics. As yet no such emancipatory mathematics exists, and we can only speculate upon its eventual content. We can see hints of it in the multidimensional and nonlinear logic of fuzzy systems theory; but this approach is still heavily marked by its origins in the crisis of late-capitalist production relations. Catastrophe theory, with its dialectical emphases on smoothness/discontinuity and metamorphosis/unfolding, will indubitably play a major role in the future mathematics; but much theoretical work remains to be done before this approach can become a concrete tool of progressive political praxis. Finally, chaos theory — which provides our deepest insights into the ubiquitous yet mysterious phenomenon of nonlinearity — will be central to all future mathematics. And yet, these images of the future mathematics must remain but the haziest glimmer: for, alongside these three young branches in the tree of science, there will arise new trunks and branches — entire new theoretical frameworks — of which we, with our present ideological blinders, cannot yet even conceive.
The paper is larded with outrageous statements about physics and math, as well as with genuine but risible quotes from “science studies” scholars. Social Text accepted it anyway. Sokal’s paper didn’t go out for formal review, but was accepted after four editors approved it in house, including Stanley Aronowitz and Andrew Ross.
Soon afterwards, Sokal published a piece in the journal Lingua Franca revealing the nature of the hoax. While many postmodernists and humanities professors were outraged, to the point of accusing Sokal of unethical behavior, scientists snickered, for we were simply tired of the ludicrous claims about science (including its failure to provide knowledge any better than other “ways of knowing”), and, in truth, I can see no better way to make Sokal’s point than through such a hoax. (I’m proud to say that the first letter to the editor about the hoax published in the New York Times, which wrote about the hoax on its front page, was by me, praising Alan’s gambit. On the same day, one of my “friends”, a postmodern English scholar, read my letter and phoned me, immediately screaming, without saying “hello” or identifying herself, that I was just dead wrong!)
What was Sokal’s point? He lays it out in another Lingua Franca piece:
WHY DID I do it? While my method was satirical, my motivation is utterly serious. What concerns me is the proliferation, not just of nonsense and sloppy thinking per se, but of a particular kind of nonsense and sloppy thinking: one that denies the existence of objective realities, or (when challenged) admits their existence but downplays their practical relevance. At its best, a journal like Social Text raises important issues that no scientist should ignore–questions, for example, about how corporate and government funding influence scientific work. Unfortunately, epistemic relativism does little to further the discussion of these matters.
In short, my concern about the spread of subjectivist thinking is both intellectual and political. Intellectually, the problem with such doctrines is that they are false (when not simply meaningless). There is a real world; its properties are not merely social constructions; facts and evidence do matter. What sane person would contend otherwise? And yet, much contemporary academic theorizing consists precisely of attempts to blur these obvious truths.
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So, what is the lesson here? Could it be that many educators are uneducable? It would seem to be the case.
Bravo Sokal!
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/01/03/sokals-hoax-twenty-years-on/
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